Sometimes the Liberty BASIC compiler finds a problem with your code, and it will stop and give you an error message of some kind. Usually this will appear on the status line at the bottom of the Liberty BASIC editor window. At other times you may see a popup error notice when running a program that you've written. There are a variety of programmer errors which can give rise to such error messages. For example, perhaps a program tries to divide a number by zero (which is mathematically impossible to do), or maybe a program closes a file, and then tries to close it again (it isn't possible to close a file that isn't open). These kinds of programmer bugs result in a popup error message.

However, sometimes you will get a popup error notice that mentions the ERROR.LOG file. This means that you have stumbled across a nastier sort of bug in Liberty BASIC itself, and Liberty BASIC has written something about that bug in the ERROR.LOG file.

What should you do with the information in the ERROR.LOG file? Some people have contacted us more than a little confused after looking at the contents of the this file. Don't worry. This information is much more useful to us, since it contains details about the internals of Liberty BASIC. We have a pretty good idea what it means. If you are so inclined, you can send it to us and we'll take a look at it and try to help you with the bug, and also use the information to fix bugs in new releases of Liberty BASIC.

To do this, send email to support@libertybasic.com and explain in as much detail as you can how the error happened. If you aren't sure how it happened, see if you can make the error happen again. It can be very hard, or nearly impossible to fix bugs when they cannot be recreated. Sometimes it helps us to figure out the cause of the error when we have access to the source code and other files that you were using when the error happened. If you can, please provide us with these things so that we can serve you best. We realize of course that sometimes you may not want to share your code and files for privacy reasons or because your company policy may forbid it, and this is perfectly understandable.

Now that you have a better understanding of what ERROR.LOG is and how to make use of it, you will be able to help us improve the quality of the Liberty BASIC programming language!